About

We’re Christoph and Nate, and each week we discuss a software design problem
and how we might solve it using functional principles and the
Clojure programming language.

We cut our teeth and built our careers in imperative and object-oriented
languages, but when we discovered functional programming, it was exciting! We
saw the potential. Solving learning exercises like
Koans,
4Clojure, and
Advent of Code was fun, expressive,
and the REPL made it easy and fast to experiment our way to a solution.

But as we tried to create larger and more complex software with Clojure, it was
often quite frustrating. We found ourselves getting stuck, fumbling around for
solutions, and struggling with some of the same challenges over and over.

Christoph Neumann

Christoph is a programming fanatic with an unyielding appetite for the challenge
of entrepreneurship. After a heady binge of
grad school—earning a master’s degree and
most of a PhD—Christoph decided to ditch the politics of academia and
take his newfound love of user-centric design and functional programming back
into industry.

Since then, Christoph has been hooked on making high-performance data-pipeline
and automation systems with ridiculously-responsive, user-friendly interfaces.

When he’s not spending time with his lovely wife and four, unusually active
children, you can find Christoph working on the next big thing for his
business, App Sauce.

Nate Jones

Nate’s been fascinated by technology his entire life, and is particularly
interested in how it is used to make our lives better.

Over the course of his career, he’s built a webmail client from scratch,
travelled to the Olympics to provide email services to athletes, and automated
the creation of infrastructures in AWS. He’s also introduced more bugs than
features along the way.

After living in the kingdom of the nouns
for many years, Nate found functional programming (and Clojure) and was
immediately hooked. Now, he works on highly performant code that is easy to
understand and fun to work with.

When he’s not at a computer, it’s most likely because he’s off on adventures
with his beautiful wife and two energetic kids.